FACTBOX: Aboriginal Australia

Statistics:
• The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports a 17 year gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Australia.
• Twice as many Aboriginal babies are of low birth weight as non-Aboriginal babies.
• In 2006, the median weekly gross income for Indigenous people was $278. This is 59% of the median weekly gross income for non-Indigenous people ($473).
• The 2009 productivity commission report said that Indigenous adults are 13 times more likely than non-Indigenous adults to be sent to jail.
• The imprisonment rate of Indigenous men in Australia is five times the imprisonment rate of black South Africans under Apartheid.

The NT intervention:
• Launched in 2007 by the Coalition government of then-PM John Howard, the NT intervention was supposedly in response to allegations in the Little Children Are Sacred report on child abuse and neglect in remote NT Aboriginal communities.
• None of the policies of the intervention were recommended in Little Children Are Sacred.
• To pass the intervention legislation through parliament, the Coalition government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act.
• As part of its law-and-order push, the intervention sent armed soldiers into remote Aboriginal areas.
• The intervention placed all welfare recipients in the 73 targeted Aboriginal communities on income management.
• Income management replaces 50% of people's welfare with the "Basics Card" that can only be spent on food, clothing and medical supplies and only in certain stores.
• Aboriginal communities were forced onto government leases — a denial of Native Title rights.
• The intervention introduced widespread alcohol bans, ignoring that most NT remote Aboriginal communities are already dry.

Two years later:
• Domestic violence complaints in the targeted communities are up 61%.
• Substance abuse is up 77%.
• School enrolments have remained unchanged.
• Child malnutrition is higher.
• The total number of confirmed cases of child abuse rose from 66 in 2006-07 to 227 in 2008-09.
• The Australian Crimes Commission, in July 2008, found no evidence of organised paedophile rings.
• Only a handful of arrests for child sexual abuse have been made, and perpetrators have been identified as both white and Black, despite intervention laws applying only to Aboriginal people.
• No new houses for Aboriginal people have been built by the federal government.

From GLW issue 822